To live anew: Seeing the world with “Easter eyes” long after the holiday is over

I must admit my favorite time of the church year is the weeks after Easter.

Seculars quickly moved on to the next sales cycles — Mother’s Day, and May Day for Renaissance revivalists and their maypoles. But after all the chocolate marshmallow eggs are long gone, the jelly beans turned to colored pebbles and the little bunnies we enjoyed seeing already starting to have bunnies of their own, the religious sphere is still all Easter, all the time. As well we should be. The season tells us what we need to know about life and death and life.

In the Bible, living again after death sometimes happens. In Kings, both Elijah and Elisha each raise someone from the dead. In Acts, Peter awakens Tabitha, a seamstress, also known as Dorcas. If my name was Dorcas, I’d call myself Tabitha, too. Jesus was downright profligate at this; he raised the widow’s son and the daughter of Jairus. I wonder if they ever dated, later; they’d certainly have something to talk about. And Lazarus, of course, was “awakened” from death. I’d liked to have seen it — the man bouncing from the tomb still bound in bandages.

But those were all resuscitations, not resurrection. They were brought back to their old lives and were recognized as their old selves. That’s a good thing. But I bet a major hospital ER resuscitates twice that many on a busy weekend. Grab the paddles and shout “Clear!” What happened to Jesus was way different.

After resurrection, nobody recognized him. Mary Magdalene, his best bud, saw him in the Easter graveyard and thought he was the gardener. Disciples on the road to Emmaus, in the upper room, by the seashore, didn’t see the old man they knew and failed to recognize him. They, and we, need to grow Easter eyes to see the Risen One. It’s like they needed an Easter lasik. The grave angel chided them, you are seeking him in the wrong place, the land of the dead. He is now transformed anew, in the land of the living. Seek him there.

Before I went to Haiti this month, I was feeling staid, stale and dusty. I’d been sick for almost two months, which scared and degraded me. I saw a trip to Haiti with the Colorado Haiti Project as a way to be brave again, to wake up.

The Episcopal Dioceses of Colorado and Haiti began a partnership almost 25 years ago when three priests, two from Colorado and one from Haiti, decided to do Konbit, a Creole word meaning “work together for the common good.” It’s grown into a 700 kid K-10th grade school, clean water projects, health clinic and job training for Petit Trou de Nippes, a rural area of 28,000 about 70 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

I attended a partnership conference of 200 American and Haitian Episcopalians. We prayed, ate and toured the capital together. Most of the rubble is gone from the horrific Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, in which about 300,000 people died and 500,000 people lost their homes. About 200,000 people are still living in tent cities. The U.N. brought aid and peacekeepers, some of whom also brought cholera from Africa, which Haitians had managed previously to avoid. Conditions are grave, the people as traumatized as we were by 9/11, Columbine, Aurora or Boston.

There are also sweet, light times, when they focus on their children, play infectious music, and evidence a hope that includes a stubborn commitment to the future of their grandchildren. They have a clear vision of what they want their country to be, a just democracy where people have what they need in order to live and thrive; yet they are frustrated again and again by circumstance, dictators and structural sins of selfishness, greed and injustice.

Not all the rubble is cleared, even at the Episcopal cathedral. Stones are still strewn around the area. There’s a portion of wall, a piece around a window. Stacked in a Tuff Shed on site are the jigsaw puzzle pieces of seven gorgeous art murals showing the life of Jesus through Haitian eyes — baptized by John under a Haitian waterfall, the Way of the Cross passing along a street of Haitian fruit peddlers, pots and art.

There are conversations about what to do with the cathedral. People who feel it was the center of their spiritual life want it rebuilt, just sturdier. Others say cathedrals are essentially a second millennium form of communication — stone media. In the third millennium, is it not time to build cathedrals of compassion? And whatever worship space that is built should be not built again, but built anew.

That’s what I was seeking, to live not again, but to live anew. To escape the video replay ingrained in my brain of planes into buildings, of a finish line uncrossed, of homes toppling around or upon us and our beloved. I’d felt frozen before Eastering in Haiti, just as I think our beloved city and our beloved country has been frozen by traumas at the start of this millennium — 9/11, remember, was in 2001.

Can we begin anew to partner with people, here or in Haiti, seek a way out of violence, a way up from poverty? We’ve learned doing mission trips alone won’t change the systems, structures, patterns and habits that strip humans of their dignity. When we stop, drop and bop with a week of health care or nutrition, it makes things better for awhile, but not for good. We need to be genuine partners in order to live anew — listening, visiting, being with each other and doing something together rather than doing something for and sometimes without them.

The Easter way is to see no lines, borders, divisions or separations between us at all.

So may we see all with Easter eyes, may we build not again but anew, live not again but live anew. The humorist James Thurber just before he died wrote to a friend, “Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate!” Amen.

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Where is your moral compass pointing? What are your social values? Hark will explore faith, morals, ethics and character at the intersection of religion ethics, culture, politics, media, science, education, economics and philosophy. At times this blog will alert readers to breaking news and trends. At times it will attempt to look more deeply into intriguing subjects. Hark means to listen attentively, and we will, as readers talk back to the news.